Tottenham Hotspur boss Ange Postecoglou was once an Australian international left-back, but he’s revealed the one thing he disliked during his playing days: running.
After emigrating to Australia from Greece as a child, Postecoglou won two domestic league titles with South Melbourne as a player and represented Australia on four occasions.
He admits his style as a full-back may not have been entirely suited to the things he asks those players to do as a manager today, with his right-back and left-back often inverting into midfield.
But asked how Postecoglou the player would have found working for Postecoglou the manager, he thinks he would have found the training sessions stimulating.
“I would have enjoyed the training, because I hated running, mate!” he said during an exclusive interview for the current issue of FourFourTwo.
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“That’s not great for a footballer. I was a decent runner, I was in decent shape, but I could never understand why we used to run at training without the ball. We’d run for kilometres and kilometres, and I absolutely hated it.
“So I’ve taken that into my coaching philosophy – everything we do in training has got to be around the way we want to play our football. So I would have enjoyed training, but it’s fair to say that as an inverted full-back, I’d have been lacking a fair bit of the qualities needed.”
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